Mark Reviews Movies: RODEO (2023)

Rodeo, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 16, 2023

The protagonist of writer/director Lola Quivoron's debut feature Rodeo is superficially fascinating. She's a young woman who's often in trouble, living on her own, and surviving and getting some kicks by stealing everything she needs and anything that she wants. Once we understand all of that, there's very little room for Quivoron's movie to expand or anywhere for its plot to go.

That's mostly because the filmmaker is content with the surfaces of her story and characters. The main one is Julia (Julie Ledru), who has been kicked out of her home and wants to join a gang of local motorbike riders. She was "born with a bike between her legs," Julia tells a man who's trying to sell his own bike online—just before she rides off without paying, leaving him with a purse filled with gravel and rocks.

Julia's a clever and increasingly ambitious thief, because she has to be one, and apart from her capacity to help the occasional person in need, such is about the extent of any kind of development of this character. It's enough, perhaps, for the part of this story that's about Julia trying to fit in with the gang, using her talents for conning and stealing to overcome some hesitation about her membership, and coming up with a plan for a big heist that should quell all of those doubts—and make for a big thrill for her.

It's obvious, though, that Quvioron wants to dig a bit deeper into this character, this world of underground riding and crime, the connections that develop between people in such a situation, and some existential or spiritual considerations about the freedom and perils of riding. Some of that reveals itself in the hostility certain members of the gang show toward Julia—not only because she's new, but also and mainly because she's a woman. She's always an outsider, either because of that prejudice or by choice, in the way she keeps Kais (Yannis Lafki), the one member who mostly accepts her, at a distance.

The same goes for Ophélie (Antonia Buresi), the wife of the gang's incarcerated leader, whose husband insists that she and their son remain under a kind of house arrest while he's gone. Julia tries to connect with the lonely, yearning woman, but such scenes aren't given the time or the room to breathe into anything more than missed potential. A similar sentiment can be aimed at Julia's dreams of a kind rider who dies shortly after she meets him, suggesting a sense of fate or doom that's tangible and awaiting our protagonist.

Anything that might add some depth to this character and story, though, becomes little more than surface-level color and texture for this tale, as it moves toward its fairly formulaic climax. Rodeo shows some promise of illuminating this culture and its participants, but that's mostly left unfulfilled.

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